


With the Help of a Brother

by Aaronna



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Amnesia, Brothers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Narcolepsy, Original Mystery Twins, Sailing, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 14:55:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6663247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaronna/pseuds/Aaronna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The two of them were broken in different ways, but with the help of a brother and good friends, they would be just fine. Nothing in the universe -heck the Multiverse- that could keep the Kings of New Jersey from helping each other when one needed the other. Not ignorance, interdimensional portals, Bill, or even issues of the mind had stopped them yet, and it wasn’t going to happen now. Twins to the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Starting Again

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first Gravity Falls story and I am more than a little nervous about it.

Ford saw what his brother was doing. With the sad looks on the kids faces, he would have done the same thing. He was impressed at how well he was doing it too. Stanley was glancing at the pictures and putting a rough idea of everything together from that.  


He knew how Fiddleford’s device worked. The Stanley they had known was gone, but he was pretending to remember from nothing but hints in the photos Mabel was flipping through. With some help, Ford was sure his brother could fake a recovery.  
Their niece and nephew were only in town for one more week, and they would not want to leave without knowing their ‘Grunkle Stan’ was back to his old self. It would take a lot of tutoring, but hopefully, Stanley would be up to the task. He would need to start as soon as possible, but it would have to wait until the kids were satisfied that they hadn’t lost their gruncle.  


~/o\~  


Ford never felt so bad in his life as he did right then. When the kids had finally gone to sleep is one of the less damaged rooms and Soos and Wendy had gone home, he had taken Stanley down to the portal level with as many of Mabel’s scrapbooks as he could find and began telling him a much facts and details as he could about what was in the images.  


That was when he realized that his ‘dumb’ brother was anything but. He watched as the brother he had always thought was mentally limited point out subtext from the pictures. And about halfway through the night, Ford watched as a confused look crossed over Stanley’s face as he stared off at at one of the many panels on the wall.  


“Stanley? What is it?”  


“That one don’t match.”  


“What?”  


“That piece a stuff on the wall. It don’t match any a the others.”  


“Which one?”  


“That’n. It’s cleaner an more bent up than the others.”  


Ford finally found which one his brother was looking at. How he had not noticed that over the last two weeks was beyond him. He walked over to the panel and opened it. He felt his heart drop in his chest. It was filled with poorly bound books with his brother’s handwriting all over them.  


There was great deal of them some of the newer one showed much neater writing while the older ones has the same old scrawl that he remembered from when they were kids. Flipping through them, he felt terrible. They were journals about Stanley’s life over the last 30 years, and it was heart breaking.  


He lost himself into Stanley’s life and saw just how good a brother he had been. He had adopted his identity and fake his own death just so that he could focus on getting his brother back. What hit his the hardest was that each entry was signed off with phrases like, “Hang on Poindexter, I ain’t givin up ya, and please don’t hate me.”  


With tears in his eyes, Ford picked up a few of the other notebooks and flipped through them. He saw where his brother had filled page after page with complex physics equations that took in account a few things he had even thought of when he built the portal. On one of the other pages Stan had paperclipped an article about a crash in New Jersey.  


“Filbrick Pines and his wife were killed in a terrible accident leaving Atlantic City last Wednesday. They were buried in the family plot during a small ceremony attended by close family and their two living sons. Stanley Pines, their second son, died the day after his parents. No service was held.”  


Ford felt like he had been punched in the gut. Stan faked his own death right after their parents died and attended their funeral in his place. According to the date, it had only been seven months since he had been pulled into the portal. Ford quickly flipped further into the notes.  


“Shermy is pretty shaken up. He realized who I was and yelled at me til he broke down cryin. I lied and told him that Ford was off on a government assignment and that I was keeping an eye on his place while he was gone. Aunt Shelly slapped me across the face and told me I was not to talk to Sherman. I promised to send her money every month for him. I sent all the money I had, but now what do I do? There is only so much food left in the house. I can’t leave. I need to work on getting Sixer back. I will find a way. Hang in there Poindexter, I ain’t givin up yet, and please don’t hate me for what I might have to do.”  


Ford was nearly in tears. He had been so hard on Stan for what he had done to the house and how obsessed with money he was. How much of that money did he actually keep? He needed to know, so he grabbed one of the newest looking books.  


“Shermy is a grandfather! I got there just before the twins were born. The little girl was a wailer! Ya could hear her from nurses’ station! I was in the room when the boy came. I can hardly remember being as scared as I has been just then. The poor little guy was blue. The cord must have been around his neck on something. After they finally got him breathing, I got to hold the two of them. Poor Shermy, I hadn’t meant to, but I held them for the entire visitin time, so he didn’t get to hold them til the next day. The boy has the big dipper on his forehead as a birthmark. That little guy is going to have a hard time in life, but I will make sure he doesn’t have to live through what Ford did. Maybe I should pitch in on their college fund like I did with their dad and Shermy. Anyway, I am still working on getting ya home Poindexter, I want ya to meet these two. Please don’t be mad cause it’s taking me so long. I will get ya back.”  


A cold knot formed in Ford’s insides. Ever since he had gotten back he had been monopolizing Dipper’s attention, and he had been keeping Stan from being with the child he had sworn to protect the day he was born. It explained why his brother had been so adamant about him staying away from the twins, a warning which he had all but ignored.  


He was reaching for another one when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He jumped and it was only due to his time in the other dimensions that kept him from falling or hitting into anything. He turned to see his confused, amnesiac brother who he had forgotten was in the room with him.  


“What’re all these?”  


“These are filled with things you wrote over the past 30 years.”  


“Are we gonna look at ‘em like those picture books?”  


Ford could only nod as tears started to run down his face.  


~/o\~  
After that night, it wasn’t hard to pull the wool over the twins’ eyes. They managed to fool most of the town as well. There were only three people who knew the truth. Fiddleford, mainly because he knew how the Memory Gun worked, Soos, who had practically lived with Stan for the past 10 years, and Wendy who had caught Ford briefing Stan about Mabel and Dipper’s preferences incorrectly.  


The speech about closing the Shack and Soos taking over had actually been rehearsed the day before so that it played out they way they needed it to. They had agreed that new start for Stan was the best idea with the added benefit of keeping communications terse enough to hide the truth about the Mystery Man’s missing memories.  


Once Dipper and Mabel were safely on their way home with Waddles, those who knew the truth about Stanley Pines took him home and began teaching him anything they thought he might need to know.  


~/o\~  


It was nearly October before they set out on the Stan-O-War II. The plan was to sightsee until the holidays and then head back to Oregon. Once winter was over, they would head out in search of anomalies and adventure.  


That was the plan, but the universe saw those plans and laughed. Five days out to sea, Ford started having issues sleeping again. Two weeks out, something no one expected happened. Ford began passing out whenever he got even remotely tired.  


Neither man thought much of it until just after the skirmish with the giant squid. The brothers had gone inside after the battle and Ford passed out in middle of a sip of coffee. Stan hadn’t known if the previous times had been normal, but this time scared the life out of him.  


Due to the amount of hot beverage in the man’s mouth, Stan practically had to heimlich the stuff out of him so that his brother could breath. After that disaster was averted, the amnesiac settled on getting Ford out of his beverage soaked sweater and shirt. That was when he found out just how much he didn’t know about his twin.  


On the body of the man he was told was his slightly older brother was a vast assortment of scars, tattoos, and other blemishes he didn’t know what to call. How had the man in front of him gained all of these? Some looked incredibly old, others looked as if they were still in the healing stage. Had Ford even let anyone tend to them?  


~/o\~  


The first thing Ford noticed was how little pain he was in. For the past 30 year it had always been there, reminding him that he was alive and none of it was a dream. He hadn’t had this low a pain level since he had been doped up after crashing that shuttle into the bay of Daf Scaffzkqb back on Lllrcnsgp Tweca Xvcms.  


Opening his eyes he found that he was in Stan’s bunk, wearing a clean set of clothes, and saw his brother asleep as the foot of the bed with his face plastered to the sheets. A twinge of guilt shot through him at the sight of his twin it such as uncomfortable position. What ever had happened must have really scared Stan for him to fall asleep like that.  


His eyes were then drawn to the floor beside his twin. There was two empty jars of liniment that Stan often used on his shoulder to allow it to utilize it’s full range of motion. Under the jars was a wash cloth and a handwritten note from Soos and Wendy about basic first aid and pain management.  


Understanding flooded the author as he rubbed one of his most painful scars under his shirt and felt the oily remnants of the pain relieving cream. Even after losing his memories, Stan still took care of his brother like he had always done when they were kids. And using most of his own pain reliever for Ford was just so Stanley that the older twin couldn’t stop the tears from falling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you guys think? Was this any good? If any of you crack the cipher for the locations Ford thought, I tip my hat to you.


	2. You be my ears and I'll be your eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ford gets temporary blinded and Stan's hearing aid dies.

Ford couldn’t remember a time that he could see properly without his glasses, but he remembers the day Stanley lost his hearing. Ma had been sick all week and Filbrick’s temper was even shorter than normal. The boys decided to help by staying out from underfoot.  


They went to wrestling practice without going home first, a mistake that they never repeated. They had been nine at the time and thought they were helping. They arrived too early for practice, but just in time to see the older class punch it out.  


After that class, there was a thirty minute break before the twins’ class started. That was when it happened. Ford never knew how the fight had started, but he remembered watching Lee get struck on the head over and over again by one of those older kids.  


When the instructor finally showed up and pulled the guy off of Stanley, the damaged had been done. Ford watched as blood poured out of both of his twin’s ears and his nose. There was blood around his mouth too, but that was for the other guy.  


Besides taking a bite of the teenager’s arm, Ford had seen his brother get in a few good jabs before he seemed to forget to use his fists. If only he hadn’t been rereading that stupid space book! Maybe if he had been paying his brother any mind then he wouldn’t be cradling his barely conscious twin in his lap.  


Like the source of the fight, Ford didn’t remember the medics and police showing up. He remembered being too scared to let them take Lee from him and having one of the people tell him how to hold his brother so he wouldn’t choke on the blood. The ride to the hospital was a blur as was the setting of Stanley’s nose and left hand.  


Ford recalls falling asleep on the gurney beside his brother and waking up to Pops yelling at a couple while Ma fussed over Stanley as he slept.  


He remembers how Lee stayed asleep for several days. Ford recalls how he was forced to leave the brother he failed when he finally did wake. He can still hear his twins frightened voice as he realized he could no longer hear.  


Despite the fact that their father showed pride in Stanley for the first time ever when the kid-who-had-done-this-to-Lee’s parents paid for all of the hospital bills and gave money for a hearing aid, the man still made sure his son got the cheapest devise possible and pocketed the rest of the money. This lead to Stanley missing most of what the teachers said and was the beginning of the huge grade difference between the twins. Ma wanted her little free spirit to take classes where the teachers could make sure her baby could hear everything, but since it would cost more, their father refused.  


It took nearly a year for Stanford’s nightmares about those days to stop and just as long for his twin to finally seem at home with his disability. School was a new place for them now. Ford saw it as a place on inequality and misunderstanding. For Stan, it was a place of new experiences.  


Ford could never forget the first time a teacher called on his brother to answer her question she had said while her back was turned to the class. Stan casually glanced at his brother’s notes and started to tell a long and elaborate explanation that sounded like it answered the question when really it was just the original question reworded and embellished with terms to make it sound smart. The best part about this was that this teacher hated the Pines boys and had purposely made sure that Stan couldn’t hear what she had said.  


That was the day that Ford realized just how smart his brother was. He might get all Cs on his tests, but he understood how people’s minds worked. That was also the day his guilt about Stanley’s hearing faded and allowed him to focus on learning and taking better notes so that Stan could learn too.  


~/o\~  


For the first time in fifty years, Stanford Filbrick Pines forgot that his brother was deaf and slept with his hearing aid off. In his defense, Ford was panicking about not being able to see after quite a bit of kraken ink from a tentacle sample exploded onto his face and leeked into his eyes. It took nearly ten minutes of bellowing for, cussing out, and begging his brother for him to remember and the guilt about Stan’s hearing to flood back.  


Fifty years of silence barely broken by a shoddy piece of tech that only worked half of the time and ate batteries like an athlete drank water. He had been the cause of that. Even if Stan didn’t remember any of it, Ford believed it would only be fitting if the ink blinded him permanently.  


His self loathing thoughts were interrupted by his brother’s bellow from the distance. “Hey Sixer. Have you seen my stupid batteries? My dumb hearing aid is dead again.” The voice got louder until it was right behind him.  


Ford turned toward the voice and was met with a gasp. “Yeesh Ford! What happened?! Are ya alright?”  


He did mean to, but he flinched when he felt his brother’s hand on his shoulder. “Whoa! Easy there. Talk to me Poindexter. What happened?”  


Ford rambled about the tentacle, apologized for everything that he had ever none to his brother, and then explained how he deserved ink in his eyes. He might have kept on baring his soul to his twin if Stan hadn’t stopped him. “I can only read lips so fast Sixer. I caught that the ink is from that sea monster from yesterday and that something was your fault and that some of this mess got in your eyes. Slow down and try again. What do I need to do?”  


Ford opened his mouth to explain the ink’s properties just in time to have a jaw popping yawn and collapse into Stan’s arms. Usually he didn’t realize when one of his narcoleptic episodes, but this time the yawn had tipped him off and it frightened him to feel his body shut down.  


~/o\~  


Waking up into silence was a beautiful thing for Stan. The first time it had happened just after Weirdmageddon, it had frightened him. Now, it was nice to wake up peacefully after all of the craziness that happened on a daily basis. It might not be the safest idea, but Stan enjoyed sleeping in tranquility with the hearing device on the side table.  
Over the past few months, this had never been a problem. Ford had even make a case for him to put the thing in on the table so that it wouldn’t get lost when the ship pitched in the waves. Today wasn’t the first time the batteries had run down, but this was the first time it had been a real issue.  


He had been shocked to the purple substance covering the face of the man he shared a face with. He never understood the protective feeling that filled him when things like this happened, but right now that feeling was the strongest it had been since the first time Stanford had had one of his sleeping fits.  


He tried to understand the man’s rambling that were spilling off of Ford’s tongue. He saw the early signs of one of those attacks, but he needed his brother to tell him what to do. His cursed to himself as the panicked man went limp.  


It took over an hour after getting Fiddleford on the computer to start removing the ink from Ford’s face. It was a slow and cautious process. If any of the ink removing solution got into the sleeping man’s eyes, it could permanently blind him.  


By the time the author woke, Stan had gotten 86% of the ink off of Ford’s face, had checked to make sure the substance hadn’t burned his twin’s corneas and flushed them with eyedrops, and was in the process of carefully cleaning the cracked lenses of the ink covered glasses. Stan had his back to his brother, so he didn’t notice him stir and then cautiously sit up. But he did feel when his twin nearly tumbled out of his bed.  


“We both know you can hardly see without your glasses, get your butt back in that bed. If Fidds was right, that ink does some nasty stuff to you when it gets into places like your eyes. Have you never heard of safety goggles? And there is no use in you arguing with me since I can’t hear ya.”  


Stan smiled when he was Ford snap his mouth shut and awkwardly climb back into the bed in the corner of his eye. He may not remember growing up with his twin, but something told him this wasn’t the first time the two of them had done this little dance. It warmed his heart to know he was doing this right.  


Looking down and the glasses in his hands, the younger man signed. There was no saving them. The ink seemed to have pitted and warped the lenses.  


Turning to his brother, Stan told Ford the news. “It looks like we are going to have to work together and get back to shore. These glasses have thrown in the towel and my hearing aid had kicked the bucket. How ‘bout you be my ears and I'll be your eyes?”  


Ford smiled slightly and nodded.


	3. Old Memories

Stan was scared. He knew based on what he had read about himself that he wasn’t the kind of guy who admitted fears, but he was terrified. Ford had been having more and more episodes and still hadn’t gotten his sight back and now there was a nasty storm heading their way.

 

Stan couldn’t let Ford stay up on deck and he couldn’t go below deck with him. They were nearing the coast, and that meant there was good chance there would be dangers in the churning waters. Stan was irritated that he couldn’t hear the weather reports on the radio and that they would be docking in Washington instead of Oregon. He also thanked the stars that they weren’t far enough north for icebergs, because with the luck he was having, they’d crash right into it.

 

He knew the storm had to be roaring around him, but he couldn’t hear a bit of it. It gave the crashing waves and flashing lightning a dream-like effect. That effect triggered a memory, or possibly a nightmare of being stuck in a thunderstorm and having nowhere to go and nothing to protect him. 

 

He knew from his old journals that he had been homeless for at least a decade, so there was a good chance that this was a memory. As he pulled himself from the feelings the scene in his mind had drug up, a massive wave crashed over the ship. The disorienting feeling of not knowing which way was up triggered another series of scenes to play through his mind. 

 

He saw Ford the age he was in that old photo get pulled under the waves and then the same thing happening to himself. He remembered worrying about Ford and seeing him not too far away with a reddish haze wafting away from him. Stan could feel the terror his younger self had felt, believing that Ford was hurt.

 

Then the scene changed to him running through a thick forest with a man in an orange jumpsuit. He could feel the pain in his side from running for so long. Then he was falling. Pain shot through his as he impacted the water. The breath was knocked out of him and was quickly replaced by the fiery burn of water in his lungs.

 

Then he was on a fishing boat with a mini version of Soos. The kid was happily sitting there with a pole in his hand when a motorboat swung right past them, causing both occupants to fall into the lake as the leaky craft capsized. Stan felt his other self panic and recall the first flashback, causing the current Stan to have a memory in a memory. He barely got his brain in order before he felt the familiar burn in his chest, but this time, it wasn’t a memory.

 

~/o\~

 

When the radio announced that there was a Bering Sea storm around where Stan had said they were, Ford nearly had another fit of narcolepsy. Stan was currently on deck during one of the worse kinds of arctic storms and Ford had no way to help him. He knew he was a liability up there. The fact that he was currently blind and had nearly passed out when he heard the weather warning was more than enough proof of that, but he needed to warn Stan. But without his hearing aid, Ford didn’t have a viable way of communicating the warning to his brother.

 

Ford had been in such a hurry to get out to sea and away from the twins that he had declined Fidds’ offer to make the Stan-O-War II able to pilot itself or or able to be seared from inside the cabin. When they returned to Gravity Falls for Thanksgiving, he was going to fix that error in judgement. But that was in the future, he needed a solution now.

 

This wasn’t the first time he had rushed into something without thinking it through. There were too many in Gravity Falls alone to count and that wasn’t including his childhood or his time on the other side of the portal. Usually mistakes like this only affected him, but there had been a few times it had affected those closest to him. 

 

Hiding the existence of the rift from Stanley and Mabel, making that deal with Cipher, confronting Stan in the living room where Pa could hear, assuming he could swim to the buoy and almost getting both himself and Stan killed, and then there was the time he had wanted Ma to pay him some attention and he ended up causing her twist her ankle running up the stairs to see what the noise was about.

 

He was known for doing this, yet he never seemed to learn. And now it was Stanley once again paying the price for Stanford Pines’ multiverse renowned impatiens. He felt bad about it each time he realized, but he forgot about it until he realized he had done it again. He need to make an effort to end the cycle he seemed to be stuck in.

 

As Ford made up his mind that he was not going to get distracted from his shortcomings, he noticed that there was a dim glow in the edge of his nonexistent vision. Turning towards it, the spot of less darkness move to be in front of him. Getting up and walking towards it, he found that it was one of the wall lamps. 

 

It took a moment for this information to register in his brain. He had seen the light. His vision was coming back! And just like that, Ford’s internal promise to think before making rash decisions was forgotten as he celebrated the beginning of his sight returning and rushed toward the main door up the the deck, the storm completely forgotten.

 

~/o\~

 

The burning cold, salty seawater in his throat brought him back to the present. Stan coughed as much of it up as he could now that the ship was once again above the surface of the ocean, but he knew there was more in there. Taking as deep of breathes as he could, the former Man of Mystery changed course, heading back out to sea and hopefully away from possible underwater hazards.

 

With that done, he headed towards the hatch to get dry and maybe hack up the rest of Nature’s pickle juice that he breathed in. He made it a few feet before his knees gave out and he began coughing his lungs up. He ended up barking so hard his dentures flew out of his mouth. He managed to grab them, but that was with the last of his energy.

 

He didn’t understand why he was so tired. He hadn’t done anything him and Ford didn’t do normally. So why the hot Belgian waffles was he so tired?! Wait? Why had he used that phase? And why did it sound so familiar to him?

 

Before he could figure out where the cuss word substitute came from, his eyes slid shut and he finished slumping to the frozen deck. Wet, cold, unconscious, and breathing poorly, that was what had become of Stanley Pines. And that was how his mostly bind twin found him.

 

~/o\~

 

Ford was so excited that he could see the various light sources in the cabin that he hurriedly rushed to get on deck to see the sun. He had been blinded before, not that he’d tell Stan. It never lasted too long, but he always loved to see the sky when his vision returned. He had been doing it for over 30 years.

 

On Djytry, he had been blinded by flash grenade while helping with an uprising against Warlord who seemed to think anyone without redhair reserved to be a slave. Luckily those he had freed had helped him the 10 hours he had been without sight. The planet’s suns hadn’t come up yet, so he had sat outside until sunrise.

 

He had visited the lightness dimension of TU\653, but were you technically blind if there was no light to see? The inhabitants seemed to think so and had pitied his lack of infrared vision. He only stayed there a day before finding a way into a lit dimension.

 

During his time at Backupsmore, he had been blinded for two days after one of the compounds he had been working with combusted right in his face. The oil the the alkaline metal had been stored in had been replaced by a hydrogenated oil which exploded when he opened the container. The culprits were never officially found, but he was fairly certain that they had been expelled from the university .

 

Before Fidds came to work for him, he managed to get blinded quite often by whichever creature he happened to be studying. Pixiedust in his eyes was not nearly as bad as having a scampfire sneeze in his face. He knew based of what happened to his assistant what if he had studied the Manotaurs’ Painhole that he would likely have unable to see for several hours.

 

The worst time was when he had been possessed by Bill. To this day, he was not sure what the sadistic demon had done. It took almost a week to come back in his right eyes and another 2 days for it to return in his left. That was when the looking at the sky ritual had begun. This time was no different and the storm was the last thing on his mind, right after Stan. All he needed was to get the stubborn door open. 

 

It took him slamming into it with his should to open, and with it came a good bit of seawater and ripping arctic winds. As the frigid air hit him, so did the knowledge that his brother was out in this. He nearly yelled for his twin before he remembered Stan’s hearing aid was dead. 

 

So, he couldn’t see since there was thick clouds blocking the sun and his vision was only just coming back, the wind was too loud to find Stan with his ears, and his brother couldn’t hear if he called for him. That left wondering aimlessly across a pitching deck, slick with ice and water, without a safety tether.

 

Readying himself for the task ahead, Ford took a deep breath and walked out onto the deck. He took all of two steps before he tripped over his twin’s limp form. When he crashed to the ground, he couldn’t figure out what he had fallen over. His heart faltered when he felt what had floored him.

 

“St-tanley? Lee? Wake up! Come on, wake up. Damn it Stanley…” 

 

Stan didn’t react at all to the shakes his brother gave him, and that worried Ford even more than finding his brother, unconscious and soaking wet on the partially frozen deck in the middle of an Arctic storm. On top of that, he wasn’t sure his body would allow him to help his twin without it sending him off into the land of snooze as Stan liked to call it.

 

~/o\~

 

Ford wasn’t sure how he managed it, but he got Stan back below deck, out of his icy wet gear, and under a heating blanket before collapsing. He didn’t pass out, but he felt physically and emotionally drained. He just laid there at the foot of the bunk looking at the faint outline he could see of his brother.

 

Seeing, in a way, his brother like that reminded him too much of those few minutes right after Bill had gone into Stan’s mind. It those moments after shooting his twin with the memory gun, he had felt hollow and empty. Feeling that same uselessness, Ford pushed his exhausted body up and started working. 

 

He didn’t care when it was, he did it. He mopped up the water that got in when the hatch to the deck was open, the “room with a view” got a thorough cleaning, and it was while he was dusting off the radio that it dawned on him. He could make Stan a good, high quality hearing aid.

 

A smile formed on his face and there it stayed. The grin didn’t fade. It was there when Stan woke up, it was present when he finished putting the hearing aid together, it grew when Stan up it in and then complained that the radio on the far end of the cabin was too loud even though it was turned down. It didn’t even disappear when he fell asleep. 

 

What finally knocked it off his face was a look of shock and amazement when he found out that Stan had remembered something. When his mouth fell open, Ford’s missing grin ended up on Stan just before he was pulled into a crushing hug by his happily crying big brother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took me so long to get this out. My life is a complete mess right now.


End file.
